FailCon Fails to Fail, Returns for 2010

Failcon, a Silicon Valley conference focused on stories of failure, was so successful last year that’s it’s back again in 2010. Which means it either failed to fail or succeeded at failure, depending on how you look at it.

In 2009, some of the Valley’s prominent tech figures including former Paypaler and now Slide founder Max Levchin, David Hornik and Zynga founder Marc Pincus talked about the projects that didn’t work — the ones few people remember, including the first four companies that failed for Levchin before PayPal sold to Ebay for $1.5 billion.

In beginning improv classes, students who take a skit down a bad road are often encouraged to throw their hands up in the air and yell, ‘I failed’

This year’s line up includes New York Times writer David Pogue, former Digg CEO Jay Adelson, former Flickr community manager Heather Champ, angel investor and Gmail creator Paul Bucheit with an opening keynote from start-up guru Steve Blank, who dedicates himself to keeping startups from failing.

“Failcon, the brainchild of event producer Cass Phillipps, along with associate producer Diane Loviglio, isn’t about celebrating failure, but about talking about why ventures failed, how failure can be acceptable, and even how to fail gracefully e.g. how do you lay off employees, shut down a company and explain to investors that their money was for naught.

“Failure is interesting,” Phillipps said. “My goal with FailCon isn’t to make money, it’s to not lose money and change people’s opinions about failure.”

The one-day conference is being held on October 25 in San Francisco, targeting start-ups. Tickets are $280 in advance, though there are plenty of discounts to be found with a simple search. Founders can also get much steeper discounts by pleading leanness, according to Phillipps.

FailCon originated, appropriately enough, from unhappiness with the final conference in an early series she worked on titled SNAP Summit, which was devoted to social networking applications and after a few years felt stale.

“Essentially the idea for Failcon came from sitting in my own show and thinking ‘I’ve heard these ideas a lot — These are the same speakers telling the same stories,'” Phillipps said. “And as a joke, I started telling attendees, ‘I wish they would tell us more about failure and what went wrong with Facebook, with your app, with scaling — I don’t know if I can be the next Zynga, but I can at least not do that.'”

And in the last year, the idea that failure is an acceptable byproduct of innovation has become more widespread, so far the haters have been confined to random Tweets.

And in fact, Silicon Valley’s success is often tied to its unique relationship to failure. While everyone inside and outside the Valley knows about the huge successes — HP, Apple, Cisco, Google, Facebook, there’s also been untold numbers of failed startups with big ambitions — (and not just the ones of gold rush legend like Pets.com or WebVan). Failure is accepted in the Valley, as a consequence of risk taking, and entrepreneurs who fail gracefully will find themselves funded again.

In beginning improv classes, students who take a skit down a bad road are often encouraged to throw their hands up in the air and yell, “I failed,” which earns them a big round of applause for the effort and honesty. While failure in the Valley isn’t met with a round of free drinks, it’s not considered a badge of shame to have tried and failed.

But outside the Valley, failure isn’t treated the same way. For instance, in France entrepreneurs who fail are unlikely to get funding again, so people hide failures and don’t talk about them.

In fact, that’s the reason Phillipps wants to take failure on the road next year, with Failcons in Paris, Buenos Aires, New York and San Francisco. Which would be epic.